Bias and Tradeoffs
The impact of bias — particularly anti-Blackness, misogyny, and ableism — on our systems is all encompassing. This is my good faith attempt at trying to explain how bias exists outside of the interpersonal and in the systems. Interpersonal bias is always pervasive, it keeps systemic solutions from being applied.
The first thing to understand is anti-Blackness installed in the country and ethos of the most marginalized person being the acceptable sacrifices.
While this is the legacy of the founding — we carry on a multiracial/multicultural legacy of making the most marginalized person in any space the acceptable tradeoff. Feel unsafe as a majority member of society, make the marginalized community less physically and economically safe to satiate the desire for the “safe” feelings. We are scaling and we don’t have a diverse enough team — we’ll sacrifice integration for now. Unity with people that hate half your coalition — lets just keep all the bad deeds out of history books and keep it moving. Folks don’t want to mask — sure lets keep disabled people out so we don’t have to.
In the long (and many times medium and short) run; accessibility, strategy, conflict, feedback culture, ability to see opportunities and threats — everything that makes an institution strong — all of it is impacted by the “logic” anti-Blackness wired into us. When applied to Black people specifically, we use those tradeoffs to obliterate the mobility and safety of Black life.
This has led to the utter exhaustion of marginalized people, ESPECIALLY Black people, for ages. When I say especially Black people, I don’t mean this in hyperbole. Most communities of color are not constantly judged by other communities of color. I find systemically, we often as other communities of color will encourage and take the tradeoffs that limit Black participation/freedom/mobility — to be seen as the “good ones” in white society. And it has led to the poor stewardship of multicultural/multiracial institutions.
Right alongside of it, misogyny taught us that if their is care labor to be done, it is the job of women to do it. If the woman is not skilled or talented in that work — she must be nefarious.
Ableism taught us the convenience of the abled is always more important than the accessibility of the disabled.
These ways of being, infect our decision making. They point our systems to exclude systems for care, systems for accessibility, and distribute risk consistently to the most marginalized people.
Taking a look at the full ramifications of tradeoffs — especially when marginalized people are involved will be abundantly necessary for all of us because none of us has been spared our cultural descendancy. We often talk about bias as if “oops, guess I have bias, everyone has bias” is enough. It is not. We must be in day to day inspection of the “logic” those biases have extended to us and actively counter program our planning and communing to defeat those biases.
I have watched this week as the world around me has had an increase in fear. Real fear. Often unprocessed fear. What I know for certain is we got here because of the willingness to make marginalized people the consistent tradeoff, and then the expansion of who is considered margnialized. Often the response to this is then to lecture marginalized people about how they “should” be acting — repeating the same cycle and cultivating the same systems and analysis once again. I long for the day we do not insist on creating deja vu.
